McCarthy: 'Tougher year' for budget

House Republican leaders were feeling good last week. The whip count for the budget looked strong, and they were well on their way to pass Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-Wis.) 2015 spending plan.

But over the weekend and early this week, things turned, and a few votes began dropping off the board. Up until Thursday — the day the bill passed — House Majority Whip Kevin McCarthy (R-Calif.) and the GOP leadership team methodically worked the rank and file, and as a result, the Republicans passed their fourth budget in a row in the middle of an election season. Even Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) got in on the vote counting.

The Ryan budget has been a staple for House Republicans since they took the majority. They hammered Democrats for skipping budgeting, and eventually prodded the Senate majority to pass their own spending plan. House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi’s (D-Calif.) team hope to use the GOP budget against Republicans in November to portray them as indiscriminate budget cutters. But for McCarthy — who herded 219 yes votes in the middle of this election year — passing a budget is the “core of who we are.”

“We believe in the fiscal house getting in order,” McCarthy said during an interview Thursday in his Capitol office. “It’s the core of the conference. It was a tougher year to do it in. You had a political year, you had a lot of other things happening, you had the budget agreement, you had excuses why people would say we didn’t need to do it, we weren’t going to fall back from why we ran, why we believe the future could be different.”

McCarthy, Ryan and other senior Republicans on the whip team have been corralling votes on the budget for weeks. But it wasn’t an easy row.

“People are in elections, you got other things that are happening, people are running for Senate, you had SGR situation,” McCarthy said, referring to the decision to pass by voice vote a contentious Medicare bill. “You had a budget agreement on the numbers. You had a lot of reasons why people would say, ‘Oh, you don’t need to do it.’ But it’s the core of who we are. We need to lay out what we believe in and what we think the path could be.”

McCarthy often has to spend a lot of time laying out that path. He sees his job as not only convincing people how to vote, but educating them on what they’re voting for. He wants his members to think big. During the budget whipping process, McCarthy brought Sir Richard Branson, the founder of Virgin, and Elon Musk, the founder of Tesla, into meetings for a chat with his vote-counting team.

After the vote passed Thursday, McCarthy said he thought the budget helps Republicans in November.

“If you sit here and you’re the Democrats, they offer nothing,” McCarthy said, referring to Senate Democrats, who are not passing a budget in 2014. “Regardless if someone likes the budget 100 percent, they respect the idea you have an idea out there. No matter what the issue is, put the idea down and have ideas, win or lose, at the end of the day.”

When Republicans return from their recess in two weeks, they have more bills to pass, including the first of their 12 appropriations bills.